The security of computing networks is an increasingly important issue. With the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web, people rely on computing networks to transfer and store more and more valuable information. This is particularly true in the context of local area networks (LANs) used by companies, schools, organizations, and other enterprises. LANs are used by groups of people to communicate and store documents and information. In the past, the security of computing networks was monitored by security devices placed on the network. Security devices generally comprise a sensor operable for generating a signal when it detects a certain event on the computing network. Security devices can also comprise components for managing and analyzing the data.
As more people began using computing networks more frequently, the networks have grown tremendously. With the growth in the size of networks and the importance of information available on the networks, there is a corresponding need for greater security monitoring. One approach to fulfilling this need has been to use a greater number and variety of security devices to adequately monitor events taking place on the network. However, the use of more security devices to monitor networks creates more data for a monitoring system to handle. More security devices also result in more data for a user to review.
The current approach to monitoring networks with many security devices involves the use of consoles that can receive data from a group of security devices. However, there are many limitations with using existing consoles to monitor a large network. Generally, consoles are inherently limited in that they can only accept data from a few security devices. A further limitation is that users can only review and process data at a relatively slow rate. Finally, because each console on the network only receives information from a limited number of security devices, it is difficult to examine security data on a network-wide basis.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need in the art for a system which will support the collection of relatively large amounts of security event data from a network. Specifically, a need exists to be able to store, filter, and analyze the large amount of security event data so that it can be easily reviewed and managed by users monitoring the network. A further need exists to be able to customize the criteria for filtering the data. There is also a need to be able to collect and format data from a variety of different security devices located on a network. A further need exists to be able to analyze the collected data on a network-wide basis. Finally, there is a need to display the data in a simple graphical format for the users monitoring the network.